Experiential, an open-source LLM gateway, hits Trendshift rank 4 at 10,884 stars

An app calling three model providers has three bills, three key sets, and three ways things can go wrong. A gateway sits between the app and the providers and makes it one. Experiential reached rank 4 on Trendshift's daily list on 23 October. The GitHub project has 10,884 stars, 244 forks and an Apache 2.0 licence. The repository was created on 24 June 2026 under Experiential Labs. Its own tagline on GitHub calls it "the open source, zero markup gateway for BYOK, self-hosted and 1000+ marketplace models".

What the README says it is

The README calls Experiential "an open source gateway and router for agent workflows". It says a team can "use hosted, BYOK, and local models through one OpenAI-compatible API". For BYOK the README names seven providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure, Bedrock, Fireworks, and OpenRouter. It says a team's own keys get "free pass-through". The "zero markup" and "free pass-through" phrases are Experiential's own description. The item has not audited the billing path.

How it works

The README says the compiled native data plane "serves every route on loopback". A Python caller can "load a fitted project router as an official OpenAI client backed by its own private gateway". The project describes its own job as "middleware to control costs, enforce guardrails, and optimize quality, costs, and speed". The product has a self-hosted mode with an exp command for local use.

The learning part

The second half of the pitch is a router that improves on traffic. The README says a team can "turn production traffic into a custom router or model". It names three goals: quality, speed and cost. It also lets a team "fine-tune an open source model you own" from the traces the gateway collects. Experiential makes no public measurement of how much any of this helps. There is no customer named in the README and no benchmark comparison with a paid gateway.

What this changes

A team already paying for a hosted gateway now has an open-source option with the same BYOK pattern. The pass-through fit is tightest for a team that uses many providers and does not want to swap SDKs. The learning features ask a team to send real production traffic through the gateway. That has its own trade-offs for privacy. Trendshift rank 4 is a strong traction signal for a project less than four months old.

Source

experientiallabs/experiential on GitHub.